Almost Timely News, 7 August 2022: The SEA Change in Marketing (8/7) :: View in Browser
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What’s On My Mind: The SEA Change in Marketing
This past week, I had the pleasure of talking with folks about how AI is impacting marketing at the annual MAICON (Marketing AI Conference) event in Cleveland, and one of the points I made is worth digging into here: the SEA change in marketing.
SEA is a silly acronym I made up that stands for Someone Else’s AI. It’s the single biggest obstacle to our marketing, assuming we have a product or service that doesn’t suck.
Take a moment to think about this. How much of your daily life is mediated by Someone Else’s AI?
If you shop on big sites like Amazon or eBay, Someone Else’s AI is nudging you strongly with product suggestions.
If you search on a search engine like Google, Bing, or DuckDuckGo, Someone Else’s AI is controlling what you do and don’t find. There may be entire corners of the web that you will never see or experience because Someone Else’s AI has deemed them inappropriate or irrelevant to you.
If you listen to music on Spotify, Someone Else’s AI is determining what songs to recommend to you, especially if you’re doing things like putting together playlists.
If you watch shows on platforms like Netflix, Someone Else’s AI is suggesting to you all the time what else you should watch.
If you consume news, especially through news apps like Apple News, Google News, or a social network, Someone Else’s AI is determining what news to show you and what news you shouldn’t see.
If you participate in mainstream social media like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, etc. Someone Else’s AI is telling you what to watch, who to listen to, even which friends are important to you.
As consumers, many of these recommendations aren’t bad. Spotify can recommend new songs or music to us that we might not otherwise find. Netflix can surface shows we might never think to watch. We can debate the merits of recommendation engines – the AI technology behind all these methods of filtering content – another time, but the reality is that much of our reality as consumers is a mediated experience.
As marketers? This can really, really suck. I don’t have control over whether Facebook shows my post or not. I don’t have control over whether Google lists my website for a relevant term on page 1 or page 175 of its results – despite what Google says in their Webmaster chats and public materials. I don’t have control over whether YouTube recommends my video or Instagram shows my Reel to my friends or TikTok puts my video in the For You page. Someone Else’s AI is in charge of all that and it’s out of my control. I can follow all the best practices and still gain no ground.
In fact, in the last few years, Someone Else’s AI has made things extremely difficult for marketers. It used to be that the risk of content performing poorly due to Someone Else’s AI was fairly low. We publish a tweet and it goes nowhere, so what? No big deal, we try again. Then images became the preferred format. That requires more effort, more resources. Then audio. Then video. Now we’re at a point where, just to satisfy Someone Else’s AI, we may have to invest substantially in content creation abilities that are very expensive – and when our efforts fall flat, we’ve burned a lot more resources than a text tweet that no one liked. And as we see companies like Facebook push harder and harder for more complex media formats like their Metaverse, we should see the writing on the wall: only those willing to pay a lot of money and invest a lot of time will do well with Someone Else’s AI.
So, as a marketer, what do I do to escape this rat race? I need two insurance policies against Someone Else’s AI. If I invest suitably in both these insurance policies – and these are substantial investments over a long period of time – I will circumvent and mitigate the worst effects of Someone Else’s AI.
Insurance policy #1 is my brand, the brand of my company, my products and services, even me as a person. When you think of getting help with analytics or marketing operations and the first thing you think about is my company, Trust Insights, then instead of looking for help generally, you’ll probably Google my company or perhaps even type my company’s domain name in directly to your browser. My brand’s strength dramatically reduces the chances Someone Else’s AI recommends someone else.
Remember that brand is reputation + recall. We want people to remember us for good things, and we accomplish that by investing heavily in the relationships we have with our audience, plus having products and services that don’t suck.
Insurance policy #2 is my community, the people I’ve built good relationships with over time. Ideally, I have a mechanism of communication with my community that doesn’t have Someone Else’s AI involved at all, like this newsletter (thank you for reading and subscribing), or something like a Slack group or a Discord server where no algorithm, no recommendation engine is competing against me – it’s just a direct line from me to you. It could even be an old school BBS or forum – heck, even a print magazine plus a PO Box. Whatever it is, as long as I have a direct line to you and you have a direct line to me, I’ve got an insurance policy against Someone Else’s AI.
Why am I spending so much time on this, and why, as someone who talks a lot about AI and its benefits, am I seemingly railing against AI? It’s not AI in general. It’s Someone Else’s AI. All Ai is optimized for specific outcomes, and unless we’re the engineers building the software models, we don’t necessarily know what those outcomes are, but we can all make some fairly decent guesses. What is Facebook’s AI optimized for? Making Facebook money. What is TikTok’s AI optimized for? How about LinkedIn? Twitter? Netflix?
You guessed it. Every instance of Someone Else’s AI is optimized for them. Not for us, not marketers. As marketers, we’re in many cases the enemy of Someone Else’s AI because we’re taking away potential money the parent company’s AI could be diverting to them. It’s one of the reasons we’ve seen influencers steadily losing ground on mainstream social networks over time – because those dollars that go to an Instagram influencer are dollars not going to Instagram, and of course their AI will optimize against that.
So it’s critical to understand that Someone Else’s AI is not our friend, not our ally. At best, they’re a temporary help to us, but our priority should always be to evacuate our audience and customers from Someone Else’s AI as quickly as we possibly can into a channel where there’s nothing between us and our customers.
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ICYMI: In Case You Missed it
Besides the new Google Analytics 4 course I’m relentlessly promoting (sorry not sorry), I would recommend the piece on demand generation tips. I love the questions you send in.
- You Ask, I Answer: Demand Generation Tips?
- Almost Timely News, 31-July-2022: Old School Podcast Marketing, First/Second/Third Party Data, Big Data Analytics
- Mind Readings: Heartbeats
- You Ask, I Answer: Counterintuitive Email Marketing Strategies?
- {PODCAST} In-Ear Insights: Attitude and Aptitude in Hiring
- So What? Your website accessibility
Skill Up With Classes
These are just a few of the classes I have available over at the Trust Insights website that you can take.
Premium
Free
- How AI is Changing Marketing, 2022 Edition
- How to Prove Social Media ROI
- Fundamentals of Marketing Analytics
- How to Think About Google Analytics 4
- Proving Social Media ROI
- Paradise by the Analytics Dashboard Light: How to Create Impactful Dashboards and Reports
Get Back to Work!
Folks who post jobs in the free Analytics for Marketers Slack community may have those jobs shared here, too. If you’re looking for work, check out these five most recent open positions, and check out the Slack group for the comprehensive list.
- Sr. Informatics and Interoperability Manager at AMA
- Community Manager at Terkel
- Manager of Digital Analytics at Zagat
- Experimentation Lead at Stepstone
- Digital Web Analytics Sr. Analyst at Express Scripts
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- You’ll learn how Google Tag Manager and Google Data Studio form the essential companion pieces to Google Analytics 4, and how to use them all together
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What I’m Reading: Your Stuff
Let’s look at the most interesting content from around the web on topics you care about, some of which you might have even written.
Social Media Marketing
- Agorapulse vs Sprout Social: Which Social Media Management Is Better?
- How To Search on TikTok for Just About Anything
- Everything you need to know about social media branding via Agility PR Solutions
Media and Content
- Is Content Marketing the Key to Capturing New Customers?
- Spin Sucks: What You Can Learn from Climate Change Contrarians
- The Creative Process Is Broken But Here Is How We Can Fix It
SEO, Google, and Paid Media
- Shopify SEO: A Simple Guide for Beginners
- How to Create SEO SOPs to Scale Organic Traffic
- 6 Ways to Integrate SEO Across Teams via C&C
Advertisement: Catch My Upcoming Free Webinar!
Marketing performance and data analysis are attached at the hip. Collecting and analyzing that data correctly empowers you to take action, produce tangible results, and drive revenue across your entire organization.
In our upcoming webinar, Bringing out the humanity in your marketing data, I’ll walk you through the process of data analysis, and how to use that data to deliver on the promise of amazing content experiences for everyone.
Join Siteimprove CMO Kevin Bobowski and me for more on:
- The data analysis process as a marketer (including the tech, people, and other elements involved)
- Whether your current analytics tool is cutting it – or even giving you the right information
- Ways to get more out of the data you collect
Tools, Machine Learning, and AI
- How ML Model Explainability Accelerates the AI Adoption Journey for Financial Services via KDnuggets
- Google AI Blog: Quantum Advantage in Learning from Experiments
- How to Deal with Categorical Data for Machine Learning via KDnuggets
Analytics, Stats, and Data Science
- Building Data Warehouse Using Google Big Query via Analytics Vidhya
- Instagram Performance for Brands via Trust Insights Marketing Analytics Consulting
- ETL vs ELT in 2022: Do they matter? –
All Things IBM
- Press one for call center modernization via Journey to AI Blog
- Decades of empowering efficient data decisions via Journey to AI Blog
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Events I’ll Be At
Here’s where I’m speaking and attending. Say hi if you’re at an event also:
- SiteImprove Webinar, August 2022, Online
- Content Marketing World, September 2022, Cleveland, OH
- MarketingProfs B2B Forum, October 2022, Boston
- Heapcon, November 2022, Belgrade, Serbia
Events marked with a physical location may become virtual if conditions and safety warrant it.
If you’re an event organizer, let me help your event shine. Visit my speaking page for more details.
Can’t be at an event? Stop by my private Slack group instead, Analytics for Marketers.
How to Stay in Touch
Let’s make sure we’re connected in the places it suits you best. Here’s where you can find different content:
- My blog – daily videos, blog posts, and podcast episodes
- My YouTube channel – daily videos, conference talks, and all things video
- My company, Trust Insights – marketing analytics help
- My podcast, Marketing over Coffee – weekly episodes of what’s worth noting in marketing
- My second podcast, In-Ear Insights – the Trust Insights weekly podcast focused on data and analytics
- On Twitter – multiple daily updates of marketing news
- On LinkedIn – daily videos and news
- On Instagram – personal photos and travels
- My free Slack discussion forum, Analytics for Marketers – open conversations about marketing and analytics
Required Disclosures
Events with links have purchased sponsorships in this newsletter and as a result, I receive direct financial compensation for promoting them.
Advertisements in this newsletter have paid to be promoted, and as a result, I receive direct financial compensation for promoting them.
My company, Trust Insights, maintains business partnerships with companies including, but not limited to, IBM, Cisco Systems, Amazon, Talkwalker, MarketingProfs, MarketMuse, Agorapulse, Hubspot, Informa, Demandbase, The Marketing AI Institute, and others. While links shared from partners are not explicit endorsements, nor do they directly financially benefit Trust Insights, a commercial relationship exists for which Trust Insights may receive indirect financial benefit, and thus I may receive indirect financial benefit from them as well.
Thank You!
Thanks for subscribing and reading this far. I appreciate it. As always, thank you for your support, your attention, and your kindness.
See you next week,
Christopher S. Penn
You might also enjoy:
- You Ask, I Answer: Retrieval Augmented Generation vs Fine-Tuning?
- Almost Timely News: Recipes vs. Principles in Generative AI (2024-03-03)
- Mind Readings: You Need Passwords for Life in the Age of Generative AI Fraud
- You Ask, I Answer: AI Music Collaborations and Copyright?
- Mind Readings: Hacking Social Media Algorithms
Want to read more like this from Christopher Penn? Get updates here:
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Christopher S. Penn is one of the world’s leading experts on AI in marketing. Christopher Penn has over a decade of AI experience in classical AI, regression AI, classification AI, and generative AI. Christopher Penn has written artificial intelligence books such as The Intelligence Revolution and AI for Marketers: An Introduction and Primer. Christopher Penn is an AI keynote speaker around the world.
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